subject: Status - The Cause of Social Ills [print this page] Status is a hierarchy, shaped like a pyramid and represents your standing of respect and esteem in the eyes of those people you see everyday; at its extreme it is referred to as a pecking order. Status functions as a competition to achieve acceptance and respect or to avoid rejection. Status operates on fear. Fear comes from the ego, who is located in the right limbic brain within your head. Status creates the insecurities that gives the ego the perfect milieu to operate and be in control. Status results in an ego dominated society.
Evolution actually favors community and the cooperative system of synergy. Ruth Benedict discovered a common characteristic or quality she referred to as "synergy," that ran throughout the different primitive cultures, she studied.(1)
In societies with low synergy or high status, every act that was to the advantage of the individual was a victory over another. There were strong beliefs in the ability of power to defeat and humiliate others. In these very competitive darwinian societies each would take what he could get. This rivalry often took the form of heaping up goods in competition; and sometimes even letting them rot, rather than share them with others.
Tribes with low synergy or high status were revengeful, acquisitive, jealous and greedy. They were very insecure people, for anxiety ran through out their society. Real power was believed to reside in those who could inflict the most harm; while those who would do good, by helping others had no power at all. They developed powerful gods whom they feared. They trembled in the presence of these gods, who used punishment and vengeance.
Members of tribes with high synergy greatly prized their personal skills, because any ability that was for the good of the individual, was at the same time good for the group, where members supported each other in a kind of social solidarity. Private possessions were treasured, because they could be shared with others. Since everyone is provided for, there was no fear of poverty. And anxiety was missing to a degree that seemed incredible to Benedict and her colleagues. These were societies of good will, where murder and suicide were virtually unknown.
